Zeng Wei, Marino Joseph, Kaufman Arie, Gu Xianfeng David
Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
Comput Graph. 2011 Jun 1;35(3):726-732. doi: 10.1016/j.cag.2011.03.008.
Volumetric colon wall unfolding is a novel method for virtual colon analysis and visualization with valuable applications in virtual colonoscopy (VC) and computer-aided detection (CAD) systems. A volumetrically unfolded colon enables doctors to visualize the entire colon structure without occlusions due to haustral folds, and is critical for performing efficient and accurate texture analysis on the volumetric colon wall. Though conventional colon surface flattening has been employed for these uses, volumetric colon unfolding offers the advantages of providing the needed quantities of information with needed accuracy. This work presents an efficient and effective volumetric colon unfolding method based on harmonic differentials. The colon volumes are reconstructed from CT images and are represented as tetrahedral meshes. Three harmonic 1-forms, which are linearly independent everywhere, are computed on the tetrahedral mesh. Through integration of the harmonic 1-forms, the colon volume is mapped periodically to a canonical cuboid. The method presented is automatic, simple, and practical. Experimental results are reported to show the performance of the algorithm on real medical datasets. Though applied here specifically to the colon, the method is general and can be generalized for other volumes.
容积性结肠壁展开是一种用于虚拟结肠分析和可视化的新方法，在虚拟结肠镜检查（VC）和计算机辅助检测（CAD）系统中有重要应用。容积性展开的结肠使医生能够在没有结肠袋褶遮挡的情况下可视化整个结肠结构，这对于在容积性结肠壁上进行高效且准确的纹理分析至关重要。虽然传统的结肠表面扁平化已用于这些用途，但容积性结肠展开具有以所需精度提供所需信息量的优势。这项工作提出了一种基于调和微分的高效且有效的容积性结肠展开方法。结肠容积由CT图像重建，并表示为四面体网格。在四面体网格上计算三个处处线性无关的调和1-形式。通过对调和1-形式的积分，结肠容积被周期性地映射到一个标准长方体。所提出的方法是自动、简单且实用的。报告了实验结果以展示该算法在真实医学数据集上的性能。虽然这里专门应用于结肠，但该方法具有通用性，可推广到其他容积。
